Got wood? Good. Then you won’t be interested in the new Clic Wooden case from Native Union. It’s a rather slick little number featuring a solid cherry wood back panel with a high-gloss plastic insert.
Mango is yet another browser-based text editor from Hog Bay Software, the folks behind apps such as TaskPaper and FoldingText. This one is a Markdown editor, but as usual with anything made by Jesse Grosjean, it has some clever twists.
As fantastically well-made as they are, I only use a Pad&Quill case permanently on one of my devices: the Kindle Paperwhite. For my iPads, I prefer something less bulky. If I used an 11-inch MacBook Air, though, I’d be all over the brand new Cartella Linen, a beautiful case which seems much more in keeping with the larger proportions of a notebook computer.
It’s a long way to December, but write this one down on the list of gifts you’re planning to buy me this Christmas: the Lomo Konstruktor, a plastic kit that turns into a plastic camera. As a photo geek who likes to make things and tinker, this is just about perfect.
Despite being so huge and heavy that it’s barely possible for one person to lift, some folks still manage to take the regular-sized iPad out of the house for extended periods of time. And if you’re doing that with the Retina iPad, you’ll know that once the battery has run down you’re looking at three to four weeks to recharge it, even if you were to plug it straight into the high-tension power lines overhead (hint: Do not do this).
That’s why the Justin Ultra-Slim Power Case was invented.
Yahoo has bought the developer of the fantastic iOS apps PhotoForge and KitCam. Ghostbird’s software team will now work for Yahoo, helping to make Flickr even better. And – as ever with these things – development on both apps will stop.
Do you like the look of the new iOS 7 AirDrop feature that lets you beam things from iDevice to iDevice? Me too. But even if you have iOS 7 installed, you still can’t beam things to and from a Mac, which is arguably a more common need for basement-bound, friendless nerds like you and I.
Enter BeamApp, which does what it says on the virtual, HTML-based tin.
Pentax’s new Q7 has been styled to look like it was put together by somebody in shop class when told to “make a camera” out of whatever wooden offcuts were laying around the place. It can even be had in 120 different color combos, presumably all hideous.
But the Q7 does add one thing that’s worth noting: A bigger sensor. And judging by how the lenses now match that sensor in terms of 35mm equivalence, it looks like this was the plan all along.
You know what’s great? Magnets. You know what’s equally great? Filtered photos. Which makes this little DIY project – using both magnets and homemade filters – double great, right? Right guys?
It looks like the new photo filters in iOS 7 are lossless. That is, the original, untouched image file is saved as is, and the effect is applied on-the-fly. This is how non-destructive editing apps like Lightroom and Aperture do their thing.
You know what’s lacking in the modern, virtual version of Monopoly? If you answered “Game features to stop you from getting bored” or “Please God no, not another game of Monopoly,” then you’d be right. But those aren’t the answers I’m looking for. The answer I’m looking for is “dice.”
Now, this is (almost) fixed. The SmartRoll is a pair of dice [1] which communicate with your iPad using Bluetooth and let you roll real dice for virtual board games.
The iPhone camera is already so much better for utility photography than a regular camera, why not use it to replace your scanner, too? That’s the idea behind the ScanDock, a combo stand, lighting rig and companion app for scanning pretty much anything on paper.
Auto background app updating isn’t just for iOS 7 — a brand new pane in System Preferences has been added to take care of App Store update settings. The big news? Auto updates in the background.
According to the fine folks at Kubxlab, there are three kinds of wood in this world: Light Wood, Dark Wood, and Brown Wood. And – as luck would have it – all three are available as materials for Kubxlab’s Ultra Thin iPhone Case.
If you thought the new icons in iOS 7 were nauseating, then try this one on for size: It’s the RoboRoach, a kit that turns any cockroach into a cyborg you can control from your iPhone. Ugh.
Leica, once a camera manufacturer that made great tools for photographers and now little more than a boutique fashion brand catering to dentists, has just played a fantastic little joke on the world. It’s called the X-Vario, and it proves that Leica thinks you’re a sucker. Why? Because it’s a $3K compact.
Years ago, I submitted a bug report to Apple. The problem? Teeny, tiny subtitles in the iOS Videos app, so small that even an eagle with binoculars couldn’t read them. I got a mail from Apple to follow up, and then, just one or two releases later, subtitles got big enough to read (the Lady and I have different native tongues so we usually watch everything with subs).
Now, in iOS 7, they’re not only big but completely customizable.
Shared Photos Stream in iOS 7 are turning out to be a much bigger deal than I first thought. After playing with them for a few hours it’s clear that they might actually be Apple’s first successful social network. Why? It’s all down to a little “Activity” tab inside the newly-named “Shared Streams.”
You know what I’m hearing a lot of today? “Whine whine whine. Don’t like the icons. This really is kind of a mess.” And this, from our very own chatroom: “It hurts the eyes,” and “The hideousness of this is blowing my mind.”
It seems that a lot of people don’t like the look of iOS 7. But you know what? I love it. Sure, some of those icons are a little garish, but in iOS 6, all of the native Apple icons were hideous. And whatever you want to say about the new look, you have to admit that it is now way more consistent.
OS X Mavericks has some crazy new power-saving technologies, as demoed yesterday at the WWDC Keynote. Most of these are system-based: the OS stops wasting CPU cycles running animations that are hidden behind another window, for example. But some, like this neat addition to the battery menu, are about advising the user what’s sucking the juice.
Our serial-inventing friend Dotan Saguy is back, this time with yet another super-smart iAccessory. It’s a little carrying case for your everyday iPad essentials, and it is designed to integrate with your iPd Smart Cover. It’s called the Smart Cargo, and it’s as ingenious as Dotan’s other Kickstarter projects like the Smarter Stand.
IOS 7 looks fantastic, and the good news is that photographers haven’t been left out of the updates. There’s new stuff in both the Camera app as well as Photos: a neat combination of flashy new features and great little fixes that will make both apps what they probably should have been to begin with.
If there’s one note that’s almost guaranteed not to be in any of the zillions of to-do apps spread across your devices, it’s “Find new to-do list app.” However, should you actually have that entry scribbled down somewhere that you can actually find, then you can now cross it off the list: The app in question is called Silo, and it’s pretty slick stuff.
The Grablet Nomad is a twist on the iPad case we glimpsed at last year’s Macworld Expo. Essentially, it adds a front cover to the strappy, grabby case, but the folks at Grablet couldn’t stop themselves from making even the front cover into an all-singing gizmo.
People talk a lot of crap about their minimalist apps, promising “distraction-free” interfaces as if distraction had anything to do with how many buttons you can see on the screen. In the future I will send those people a link to download Slicereader, a reading app so truly minimal that it doesn’t even have an open/save dialog.